07.12.10
Online Publishing Software – the Secret to Picking the Best Supplier for You
Producing an electronic magazine is a lot of effort, so it’d be a shame to destroy all the work with an inferior online newsletter software package. Actually, picking out a software supplier is one of the most important decisions you’ll take when you produce digital publication. And they don’t only give advice on putting your content into some pleasant format. Simplicity of use is an essential part of the package to look out for. After all, it doesn’t matter how wonderful the computer software is if you or your staff can’t do anything with it! Your electronic magazine should matter enough to you that you test out different providers.
Further major decisions you need to make are safeguarding security. Now you should be thinking about hackers. Is the creativity protected? Is the content secured? Is it possible for people to just copy-paste your magazine content or has the digital publishing software supplier something in place peventing these things? Is your content protected by the e-publishing software vendor from copying and pasting by the general reader?
When you’ve created an electronic magazine you should make a business plan. Whatever your marketing plan may look like, you need to consider such things – maybe not for every publication but rather for the business as a whole. How will you use modern media? How are you handling advertising? Content co-operative with search engines is also essential as you consider how to commercialize your digital publication. Will your publication content only be made accessible for free? Think whether you can offer multiple subscriptions. Also, the nature of your content – is it monetized ? What about providing summaries and teasers to sell this digital publication? How accessible is the magazine? Is it private — in which case you can investigate all your hosting possibilities or is it public? You will probably be better hosting directly with your supplier. Have you figured out how to cope with back-issues? Even before it actually becomes a necessity, you have to think about critical situations. How is the level of technical support? What quality are their FAQs? Is there useful information to fix things which you can actually use? Check their response times. Try calling their emergency phone number to test it out. Technical support may be the last consideration but it should be a deciding factor in your choice. Chances are you really don’t want to discover only when it’s too late that they’re actually attempting to cut corners in a detrimental way here! You decide the success of your e-publication by selecting the correct software package provider. Think about this decision if you want success.
